Geneva, August 24(ANI): Baloch Republican Party leader Brahumdagh Bugti has called on the United States to end aid to the Pakistan Army, which, he said, was diverting resources from intended counterterrorism goals and using them to suppress the Baluch.
"If the U.S. stopped the military and financial assistance, they could not continue their operations for long," The New York Times quoted Bugti, a Baluch resistance leader in exile, as saying.
Bugti has been on the run since 2006, when he narrowly escaped a Pakistani Army operation that killed his grandfather and dozens of his tribesmen in Baluchistan.
Since then, the government's attempt to stamp out an uprising by the Baluch ethnic minority has only intensified, according to human rights organizations and Pakistani politicians.
The Baluch insurgency, which has gone on intermittently for decades, is often called Pakistan's Dirty War, because of the rising numbers of people who have disappeared or have been killed on both sides, the report said.
But it has received little attention internationally, in part because most eyes are turned toward the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Pakistan's northwestern tribal areas, it added.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented a rising number of abuses by the Pakistani security forces in Baluchistan, with AI describing the use of "kill and dump" tactics, under which activists, teachers, journalists and lawyers, even teenagers, have been detained and their bullet-ridden bodies dumped on roadsides at a rate of about 20 a month in recent months, the report said.
Human Rights Watch has reported a growing trend of retaliation by armed rebels on non-Baluch settlers, including the targeted killings of 22 teachers.
Despite the end of General Musharraf's rule and Pakistan's return to a democratic government in 2008, military repression of the Baluch has only increased, Bugti and others say.
Members of the civilian government say that they have no power over the military, and the army is obsessed with crushing an uprising that it sees as an effort by India to undermine Pakistani sovereignty, the paper said.
The increased violence has pushed the Baluch far beyond their original demands for greater autonomy and recognition of their rights and toward an armed independence movement. "Ninety-nine percent of the Baluch now want liberation," Bugti said.
"The people are more angry and they will go to the side of those using violence, because if you close all the peaceful ways of struggle, and you kidnap the peaceful, political activists, and torture them to death and throw their bodies on roadsides, then definitely they will go and join the armed resistance groups," he said. (ANI)
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